Week 1 Blog Post
One of the precepts of Social Media Best Practice is building a personal brand, "a process that is always evolving and adapting, just as you are always evolving and adapting." An important strategy for personal branding online is to engage; this is where you ensure you "talk to others, join the conversation, join groups, make friends and make sure you respond to people." Mejuri is a now established jewelry brand based in Canada. Their online presence has grown incrementally over the past 5 years, and we watched them grow from a small Vancouver jewelry brand to multiple successful locations across the country. Engaging with their customers is a part a personal branding that Mejuri ensures they are consistent in. As you can see in the screenshot above, they reply back to comments under their posts often - this builds a strong relationship with their target market and makes potential and current customers feel that they are seen and heard by the brand they are supporting - and that support comes full circle for Mejuri.
Another brand's social media presence that I find interesting is The Honey Pot Co. For the sake of context, they are a women's hygiene product company, but what I find interesting is how they have approached Self Branding, and their hyper display of their "authentic selves." As you can see in the screenshot above, the brand uses very raw language to capture their target audience. Women's hygiene has always been a taboo subject of conversation across all cultures, and this brand works to actively break the stigma of conversation around women's hygiene. While most of their posts come across as relatable memes, they still ensure that their products are tied in to their playful nuances. In the comic above, for example, a woman is seen putting on a pad while on a video meeting; while it plays on the fear we all have of doing something odd with the camera accidentally on, users can still see a Honey Pot Co product pictured in the background, as well as a corresponding caption promoting their "Peppermint Milkshake pad." Although ones "authentic self" is discussed as something in discourse of "self branding," this brand effectively ties both concepts into their personal branding. Honey Pot Co breaks that wall by portraying a sense of authentic self that their target market can relate to, effectively allowing them to feel authentic in their purchase of the Honey Pot Co products.